A recurring motif permeates a host of 2025's genre movies. This concept that goes all the way back to the time of silent film comedy. In the new *Superman* film, the villain is a envious, ruthless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to smear Earth's greatest hero while orchestrating world events to enrich himself. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the antagonist is a privileged biotech mogul investing vast sums to cast the heroes into a monster-filled arena for personal amusement. Within the animated sequel *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a clan of super-wealthy lynxes who stole a kindly mom’s life-changing idea and set her up for murder, purely for their dynasty's gain.
A Tradition of Film Elite Villainy
In the remake of *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a affluent bad guy operating a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging AI forgeries and a powerful media apparatus to label them as greedy, lazy, scary criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn't highlight wealth disparity in such a blunt manner, but its evil characters reside in clear extravagance while preying upon and oppressing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and into bondage. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's highest-grossing film, pits the tough people of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who dwell in extravagant sky-high mansions floating overhead. Remarkably, the zany comedy reboot *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — to make money, of course.
It is not particularly surprising in a run of movies assuming as fact that the affluent have excessive influence, lack ethics or compassion, and a endless, demanding hunger for increased fortune. "Elites are the bad guys and scrappy underdogs are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the birth of movies, with early comedies setting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, industrialists, and bumbling wealthy fools. Starting with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" classic musicals to the 1980s dance movies that revised that very premise for the era of the exploitative, damaging entrepreneurial bad guy, the entire history of cinema is replete with "eat the rich" stories, which take it for granted that affluence is incompatible with core morality, and exalt the defusing, downfall, and sometimes demise of powerful, wealthy people.
The Catharsis That Changes Nothing
And yet, somehow, we consistently fail to taking down the wealthy. On each occasion elected officials follow a tragic gun violence event by pointing fingers at graphic media, I sigh with frustration, because if people actually were that easily influenced — if repeated viewing to an idea via media was enough to cause it to infiltrate the societal mindset — surely American society would not continue to worship billionaires. Still the headlines demonstrates regularly that a significant portion of Americans subconsciously associate wealth with smartness and importance, even after a century of cinema's biggest movies promoting the opposite.
If anything, it appears that the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has created a relief valve that gets in the way of real-world action. Provided with a frequent serving of largely uplifting tales where the everyman triumphs, while the billionaires are neutralized and shamed, everyone can leave the theater feeling good about justice being served. These movies are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that determined protagonists will root out any bad apples among the mostly industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Edge in 2025
But while 2025's movies are not novel in that sense, they certainly adhere to some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, sharper, more direct, and seemingly more fatal. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people gain some humility in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they exploited, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious rich individuals were killed by fantastical monsters (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were blown up on a distant sphere (*Mickey 17*) and gunned down directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a improvised weapon (*Companion*) and beaten to death by an ambitious rival (*Him*).
"Almost none of 2025’s extremely affluent villains get the packed into a police car finale, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals live by different standards, and are highly probable to negotiate their release."
The "behind bars" outcome fails to deliver anymore. Conversely, these villains are likely to perish at the end of their movies, often in particularly grotesque, ironic ways.
Key Outliers
There are exceptions, certainly. Lex Luthor in *Superman* is only disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* ends up confined to the digital realm, where he’s clearly being saved for possible sequels. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* is stripped of all his money and is reformed as a person. The wealthy lynx dynasty members in *Zootopia 2* are unmasked as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
